Typo of the week

[rivkat]

"... it is the business of enticing Turks to violate a tenant of their religion ..."

Public/pubic one expects, but this is a nasty business indeed!

Also, I watched Bring It On: All or Nothing (Hayden Panettiere! Cheerleading! What could go wrong?) and I am sorry to say that I had no idea how much could go wrong. There were several scenes that just rewrote scenes in Bring It On, managing to lose their freshness and replace it with crassness -- on direct to video I guess you get to say "shit" and ramp up the sexuality. But that wasn't the bad part, not really; the bad part was the plot, in which Britney (Panettiere) has to leave her rich lily-white (with token Asian-American) high school, where she was team captain, and attend the poor brown high school down the road. The set dressing was plausible -- the stuff on the walls was not that different from the stuff on the walls of my 99% black middle school in DC -- but beyond that things got bad fast.

See, Britney has to convince the team captain to incorporate "crunking" and other "ghetto" styles (the quote marks are in the dialogue, I assure you) into their routine in order to impress Rihanna at the big audition to be in Rihanna's new video. Because the team captain couldn't figure that out herself, even though we're told she routinely includes moves that are banned in official competition rules for being too sexy. The skanky race and gender politics are so tangled here, I can't sort them out.

So, okay, what these people need is a honky. To release the power of their own culture! Which they did not fully appreciate until she unlocked it for them!

But it's not over, because Britney then returns to her homecoming dance and, in a cheer-off, defeats her evil blonde replacement by incorporating these aggressively sexual "ghetto" moves she's learned into her routine. Panettiere has charisma, but not enough to make this look good; it's more Weird Al's White and Nerdy persona than Eminem on the cultural appropriation scale, except without the self-mockery. Self-mockery sets in by the time Britney shows up before the big meet with her hair in braids, wearing big pink sweats with one leg rolled up to the knee, but by then it just made me cringe more.

I remember Bring It On as being a lot better on the race/class issues, with a plot that refused the white star's attempts to rescue the black team, but then I was exercising my privilege not to notice much more aggressively when I saw it. I hope I can rewatch it and still enjoy it.

Comments

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Can anything be salvaged by remixing Bring It On with Heroes around Hayden-as-cheerleader? No? I guess that would be unlikely, given the race issues in Heroes (*points to bobthehaitian*).

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

I could see a vid done as Claire's fantasy of the life she could have had -- the white HS's costumes are even the same colors as Claire's team's -- but I couldn't read end-of-S1 Claire as wanting that kind of life any more.

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

However, now I very much want a cheerleader vid, starring Buffy, Claire, and Lana, showing them cheering and then kicking ass. You could manipulate it to use Eliza Dushku's different roles, but that might break the frame too much. The thing to do would be to set it to an actual cheer routine music montage, with a cheer in the middle (perhaps the ass-kicking).

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

I would motion to add Lyla from Friday Night Lights, except that the show doesn't really offer enough good cheerleading clips for vidding. And sadly, nowhere near on par with those other shows in its ass-kicking quota.

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

Hee. I've often wanted a cheerleading vid to Oh, Mickey (based on the music video, not its use in Bring it On (original flavor)).